Discovering Self!

By Bukka Rennie
August 20, 2003

How is a sense of self discovered nurtured? As usual in this place we seem to be attempting to administrate it into being. A committee of professionals have been set up by the President to deliberate and to propose within twelve months a path that we can follow towards creating, out of these desperate, diverse and disparate groups of people, a nationhood with a common sense of self and a common destiny.

Such an approach is quite typical here. So, we have decided to be developed by year 2020. As if development is an event and not a process, as if development can be measured in static terms of so much of this or that material thing. You know, five(5) football stadia equals football prowess and development. Quite fortuitously, recent history has since disabused us of that; for five(5) stadia devoid of a coherent strategy for football development has virtually put us among the lasts in the region.

In similar context a committee of leaders of different racial backgrounds have been set up to advise on how to fix our race relations. Such an approach is nothing short of madness. What, however, we shall get from all this is surely an illusion that at least we are doing something. Some people apparently need that.

A sense of self is derived and nurtured only by way of BELONGING and CREATING. We, all of us, must first of all come to feel that we OWN this place, that this country belongs to us. Listen to what was said sometime ago in this column: "... It is the natural instinct of every human being, every animal on this planet, to mark off territory, a piece of this Earth, and subdue it and develop it and defend it, as the major means of guaranteeing preservation and further development of its kind. Every group of human life did that as does every dog, every rat. Every section of humanity developed a psychological and emotional attachment to a land base and a sense of geography, crucial to self-assurance and general well-being..."

It was Malcolm X who made the telling point that the English originate in England and the French come from France and so on. It is our feeling of being transient and not-belonging to this landscape or not the owners of this landscape that is the basis of our hostilities, our insecurity, and suspicion and deep distrust of the Other. Who is to possess this land-base? That is the key question. I have maintained for years that Caribbean civilization began with the sugar plantation industry and therefore any fundamental social transformation must begin with the dismantling of the plantation i.e. economic structures and relationships.

It meant freeing ourselves finally from the constriction of primary commodity production for export and opening up a whole new vista of economic challenges forcing us as a united whole to face the world on our terms. I, for one, was not put off that the anachronistic Caroni 1975 Ltd. was put to rest on Emancipation Day, it was the ideal signal of true emancipation and allowed for both ex-slaves and ex-indentureds to embrace each other across the divide and set the stage in genuine reflection and introspection in regard to a new day and a new arrangement. It is crucial now that we begin to implement a Land Reform programme on a nationwide basis, starting with Caroni, so that all can come to feel that they belong here and they own here. Nothing less will suffice. We can talk forever in these committees about "self discovery" and fixing "race relations" nothing will change without a National Land Reform programme to which we are all a part. A relationship to ownership is the very first prerequisite

We also come to know Self through that which we create as we engage each other. We are yet to comprehend that whether we came here in chains or seeking fortune, we nevertheless came with OURSELVES. The day, we come to understand that, is the day that our mental emancipation shall truly begin. At any given moment in time an individual is representative of the sum total of his/her people's collective history. The only way this assumption could be deemed wrong would be if that individual were to drop abruptly from the sky devoid of any human lineage and connection. We came with OURSELVES and enwrapped in that corporeality of ourselves was the manifestation of the thousands of years seeking meaning to and for ourselves in very old worlds. Everyone came with a story and a view of the universe which placed him/her at the center of all purpose and focus. It is precisely because of the power of this reality which we embodied when we came why we were able to survive and to assimilate and re-define and re-design ourselves so readily in the New World.

We are creatures of subterfuge and social revolution. It was more the case that we "Africanised" and "Indianised" British culture throughout the course of slavery and colonialism rather than the other way around. Hence the reason I have always hesitated to give credence to the concept of "Afro-Saxon"/ "Indo-Saxon" as worthy of being considered anything more than mere "fatigue". Caribbean civilization represents the meeting of Old and New Worlds and the freshness of being ever caught up in a creative whirlpool of constant flux. Caribbean people derive their creative cultural power from the antagonistic contradiction of being a product of globalised capitalist commodity production while yet at the same time being a new people in a state of flux, free of debilitating tradition, and constantly being made and re-made.

It is why the Caribbean has been able to give to the world the two greatest cultural phenomena of the 20th Century: Bob Marley and Pan. And there is more to come as Calypso as a Western musical genre continues its way to fashion itself into a World Beat with Eastern Hemispheric/East Indian influences and nuances. It's early days yet. We are to know ourselves from coming to grips with all our creative cultural manifestations. We are what we do and what we create.

There is nothing wrong with the contesting by people for pride of place and space in a world of flux. We have to engage each other. That is the politics of the time. The racial tension that results is par for the course. The process of globalization seeks to reduce all peoples to a sickening cultural sameness, to a common denominator of "Americanism". Everybody in rebuttal shall be seeking to "big-up" their ethnic peculiarities. There shall be struggles, bitter at times, as people mobilize to advance their demands but I am not overly worried by that. In the end, reason shall prevail though at times it may not appear so. Politics must be allowed to play itself out towards new levels of harmony in diversity. Come what may, in the end we are al, Earthlings!